As personal computers become more common in homes and businesses without a dedicated technical support staff, the ability to provide problem resolution from a remote location becomes increasingly important. Current support solutions include remote control of a client computer through a network to enable support personnel to run diagnostic tests. However, when the problem is rooted in events that occurred many days previous to the symptoms, such remote control may be of little use. Therefore, there is a need to provide ongoing status information from a client computer to a remote support organization.